Wonderland (18 page)

I nod. “It’s all right. We were just getting started, really, when—” I nearly begin to cry again, then abruptly stop. The grief moves like this, I’ve learned in the past two days, expanding and contracting unpredictably. I feel simultaneously transparent and weighed-down; my skin hurts as if I have a fever. My bones hurt. I can’t remember the last time I washed my hair. I put a hand to it—too long ago, apparently. I have a sudden urge to call Billy Q; I’m sure he would listen attentively. Unfortunately, or fortunately, I don’t have his number.

“Do you think it will be a success?” she asks, rummaging around a worktable. She finds a faded Polaroid. “Look at this. It’s Mom and Dad in Disneyland, of all places.”

“What kind of question is that?”

Her blond hair falls across her face, veiling it. “Don’t be so paranoid, Anna. It’s just a question.”

“No, it isn’t.”

Lila shrugs.

Don’t take the bait, don’t take the bait, don’t take the bait.
“I can’t believe this. I can’t believe he’s dead. It feels surreal.”

Lila says, “Not to me.”

“What?”

She puts the picture down. “Look at it in here.” Her voice is sharp. “It’s a sarcophagus. Do you remember the old studio?”

I know the one she means, the only one of the many that we call “the old studio”—it was in Newark, at the back of a defunct tannery; it looked like a mélange of woodworking shop, butcher shop, junkyard, and cabinet of curiosities. The fluorescent lighting, when it had to be on, made everyone look like the undead. There were tools everywhere, a winch hanging from the ceiling, vises and blowtorches, architects’ blueprints, the front fender of a car. It smelled, for some reason we could never figure out, like rotting fish. The windows were cracked, some mended with cardboard and electrical tape. The stray cats my father fed, too generously, milled around outside the windows, yowling.

“You broke your arm in there,” I say.

Lila holds her right arm out, smiling. “It’s still not entirely straight. Never will be.” I can’t see the curve, but I know it’s there, a very subtle warp in her forearm.

“Okay, I know,” I say. “We both know. But what else was he going to do? The big commissions weren’t coming his way anymore. Things changed, he changed . . .”

“That’s one word for it. And Jenny. It’s like he married his nurse.” She shakes her head. “He never should have moved to Vermont. Those kids, Jesus. What is she going to do?”

“Well, it’s cheaper here. Jenny’s from here, she knows people.” I’m not sure why I’m being so placating. I hate it, too, all the empty prettiness, the easy, lazy appeal to the viewer. Where is the man who broke the train in half? Why did he lose heart? And that field, was it a field of poppies? Was he vapidly happy painting it? Or did it, not the prison, defeat him? Was he trying to paint his way out? Or farther under, already burying himself? The repetition says the former, but the picturesque studio says the latter. Hard to tell if he was killed by the field, or if he suffocated himself with it, mouth stuffed with wildflowers.

Lila picks up the sheaf of green ferns and hurls it ineptly to the floor. She begins crying in jagged, choking sobs, her fingers to her face, like a cage. “I
hate
it here,” she sobs. “This place is awful.”

“Isn’t Wyoming sort of like this?” I ask, almost innocently. “It was quiet, I don’t know—”

“Wyoming is
nothing
like this. Wyoming is real. Everything here is fake.” She glares at me, her face red and damp. “If you ever came to visit, you’d know that.”

“I have come, that’s not fair.”

“Not since the kids were in diapers. Jake is in junior high now.”

“Well,” I say, “I—” There is no answer to this. “I was a mess, Lila. Did you want them to see me like that?” This is only half the truth, of course. “I was going through a bad time.”

Lila glares, wrapping her arms around herself. “You’re so full of shit, Anna. You don’t know anything.”

I stoop to pick up the ferns, set them on a worktable. The pliancy of the green fronds reminds me of his hands: square, scarred, a worker’s hands, but so dexterous. Pearly ovals of sturdy fingernails. When he drew, he held the pencil or charcoal poised with great delicacy, nearly seeming to float between his index and second finger. You couldn’t see where the pressure was being exerted as the shapes formed rapidly on the page. He always drew in a hurry, squinting and frowning, looking like he was in pain. He banged at the paper percussively with the charcoal. “What happened to all those drawings of you? Those were so much better than any of this stuff.”

Lila shakes her head. “God, I don’t know. Maybe Mom has them. I hope she burned them.”

A small silence falls between us. “Lila,” I say, and say it firmly.

“So when are you leaving?” she says with unmistakable bitterness. Her cheeks are flushed, lineless.

“I’ll go back in a few days. We can’t sort all of this out now anyway.” Lila’s face is turned away from me, hidden by the fall of golden hair. “Aren’t you going back to your family?”

“Dave and the boys are coming tomorrow,” she murmurs.

Silence. I think Lila is crying, but she won’t let me see her face.

I try again. “Lila.”

“He’s dead.”

“Lila—”

“It’s nothing that simple. Nothing that grotesque. I can’t explain it, I’ve never been able to explain it.” She looks directly at me, tear-streaked, red-faced. “I don’t understand anything, either.”

“I sold the lighthouse rock,” I offer. “For the tour.”

She rears back. “You did what? You had no right to do that. Anna, that was a
gift
—you squandered that, and for what? Some desperate fantasy?”

I walk outside the studio so that I don’t hit her, or, more likely, say something so completely unsayable—
he didn’t draw me
—that it can never be repaired. I slam the studio door and sit down on the sagging wooden step. I am shaking. I mop my runny nose with my hand. I think of the
schön
man, William, and cry harder. I don’t know his last name, or what the name of the street or the restaurant was; I caught a taxi back to the hotel that night. I wouldn’t know how to find my way back. Would William know, could he tell me, what happened to the four of us? Could he tell me, for instance, what wounded my father so deeply he couldn’t ever really recover? What was that look that crossed William’s face? He wouldn’t want me to know, and it’s not my business. Anyway, we’re not going back to Berlin.

I want to tell someone, maybe William, that I can’t bear it that we’re going to box up our father’s studio. It feels like we’re dismembering him, like we’re surrendering, too. But I already betrayed him. I should have been here when it happened, I should have held his hand as he was dying. Lila is right about all my failures. The tears come again, uncontrollable. What I should do is call Jim, that would be the right thing to do, but I can’t bring myself to do it. He can say the sober, appropriate thing to me tomorrow. I look at the field of Vermont wildflowers with the sun playing over it and think of the field out the window of the train to Göteborg. Is there a rhyme there, a synchrony? Only the easy answer is yes. Someone else, not me, Jim maybe (why am I being so mean?), would make a lyric out of that. The butterflies hover over the field’s surface, their Technicolor wings fluttering. It is impossible, this place, Lila is right about that, too. No one could paint anything here. The field defeated him and he knew it, and his heart just stopped.

The studio door opens and Lila comes out with the crumpled pack of Gitanes and a match. She takes a cigarette, hands the pack to me, and I take one. Lila and I sit on the front step, ass to ass, in silence. I slowly draw on the Gitane, which is stale and tastes like smoldering asphalt. I don’t like it but smoke it anyway. I want to feel the edge of something irrefutable and real and toxic. The smoke rises and disperses around us, above us. Lila hums a tune I don’t recognize. I look at my sister, at her angry, perfect profile. Her eyes are red-rimmed but still beautiful, expressive, tilting down at the corners in the way I have always thought of as Russian.
Where have you been?
I want to say to her.
The north?

Instead, willingly laying my head on the chopping block again, I ask, “When is Mom coming? I didn’t have time to call, I just got on the first plane out, it was midnight in the States—”

“She might not be. She said she might be too upset, she doesn’t want to make a scene. She’s really torn up about this.” Lila says this with perfect evenness, clearly making an effort, in our fragile truce, not to indicate that she, Lila, is superior for having called our mother and gathered this emotional information that I was too lazy/busy/washed up/self-involved to discover.

“God,” I say. “It’s awful. What happened.”

Lila blows a smoke ring into the sweet Vermont air. It is warmer outside than it was in the studio. “It was what it was.”

“Do you remember the house in Trondheim? The one with the octagonal room?”

“Trondheim. Why did we go to Trondheim?”

“Dad was supposed to do that thing with the pier. Which he couldn’t do. Mom had the affair with the composer.”

“She did?”

“You knew that,” I say. “The young one, Erik. Scruffy guy. He was always over.” I warm up, too, talking about it—I want to be here, stay here. I want this to be just two sisters, two daughters, the Brundage girls, no one else. Belonging to no one else. “I had a crush on him.”

“Yeah,” says Lila vaguely. “Me, too. Wow. Mom.”

“That raccoon is really the limit,” I say. “It’s like he wanted everyone to know what a sham this was.”

“A cry for help, as it were,” says Lila wryly, holding up a hand in a pawlike way.

“I can’t stand it,” I say, my voice breaking. Lila takes my hand, squeezes it. We fall silent, leaning against the studio door. Jenny comes out of the house, shooing the twins in front of her toward the car. She makes hand gestures that probably mean she’ll be back soon. I wave back and force a smile. It’s not Jenny’s fault. It was before her time. It can’t be explained, even if she wanted that, which she doesn’t.

“They’re all coming in a few hours,” Lila says after a while, stubbing out her cigarette. Her face has softened, finally.

“Who?”

“Aunt Laura, Aunt Beth, Aunt Jean. The cousins. The whole thing. Dad’s dealer.”

“I just want to stay here,” I say. “On this step.”

“I know,” says Lila. “Look at that field. Nature doesn’t need our efforts to be beautiful. It isn’t composed. It doesn’t have to change into anything else.” In that long-ago shack, Lila ran naked into the Irish Sea every morning, emerging red, ecstatic, shivering. We sat on the wooden front step of that shack, too, sharing cigarettes and coffee, joints and beers, magic mushrooms and wine, watching the infinite waves. I was always too scared to run into the cold, rough sea, naked or not. Lila was the reckless one, the diver-into-seas, the roller-down-of-dunes, the girl who sent herself away to school, the woman who refuses to compose. How can will take such different forms? One red, one blue. One going north, one going south.

Now the field before us stretches out in all directions under the watery blue of the sky, offering no judgments, no refrains, no consolation. I stub out my cigarette, too, but Lila and I don’t move from the step. When my father’s sisters trouble the field—Laura plunging in with her long stride, Beth talking a mile a minute, Jean standing at the edge with a hand to her bandannaed head, the sounds from the house getting louder, car doors closing—it creates the illusion that the field is responding, that it has something to say, but by then Lila and I have been watching it for so long that we know that isn’t true. It’s just a field. An irregular segment of earth. It doesn’t know he’s dead. Even when we scatter my father’s ashes there three days later, the wildflowers wave, the birds chirp, the breeze moves as lightly as ever. The field takes him, effortlessly incorporating the bits of bone and ash. All our fingers are marked with it, smudged gray, as if from some religious ritual. I smoke another horrid stale Gitane, turning that to ash as well, during the singing, the tributes, the stories of his bravery and passion. No one tells the story of when that stopped. Even I can’t remember exactly when the tilt turned into falling irreparably behind, falling away. Sometime after Rome.

We populate the field all the way back to the edge near the house, almost everyone who once inhabited my father’s consciousness—except our mother, who has taken to her bed in Asbury Park with the cat in her lap. Eddie is bringing her tea. Jenny, pale, stands with a hand on the shoulder of each twin, small boys in dark suits and ties, sober-faced. They look like my father as a child, doubled. Aunt Laura, mammoth in her Wiccan robes, squints resentfully at the sun. “They called for rain,” she says. “I knew they were wrong.”

In the ample, sun-filled kitchen the next morning, Jenny and Lila and I sit at the round table, coffee mugs in hand, a plate of hyperbolically fat-topped muffins, brought by a neighbor, looming in the middle of the table. Jenny, the lawyer, is neither unkind nor unfair as she explains the situation to us. She doesn’t want us to leave Vermont wondering what will happen next. The situation is this: there is nothing but this house we sit in, this house where Jenny and the twins live, and the red box of the studio we can see in the field through the kitchen’s French doors. Jenny plans to rent that out, because there is also a fair amount of debt. She has spoken to my father’s dealer, and there may be exhibits down the line, museums interested in the documentation of what he did. Everyone expects his reputation to continue to grow, but, as we know, many of those huge structures were demolished after he cut them up, and even those that remain standing can’t be collected. No one “collects” a perforated Irish lighthouse, which was, in any case, owned by the Irish government. The fragments and sketches he gave us as birthday gifts, of course, are valuable, even more so now, and how we handle them is entirely up to us. Lila, showing some mercy for once, doesn’t look at me. Jenny rubs her temples. Your father was a brilliant man, like no one she had ever known, no one she expects ever to know, but he wasn’t a practical one. He made you, she says generously, and that’s a lot to give to this world. He and I made our incredible boys. All the rest, his ideas, they’re out there forever. I’m sorry, girls, she says. I wish I had better news. I wish I were, well, in a funny way I wish I were older. But I’m not. This is where I live. I work in this town. She looks at her hands. Your dad was a great man.